Posts

What things to watch out for whenever choosing your hosting service provider.

Like any technology that is now more commonplace, to the point of commoditization, price starts to become one of the main points of differentiation. You’ve only got to look at the way mobile phones are sold to see that in action on a basis that is daily.

It’s also present where hosting that is cloud concerned. No one would argue that price isn’t important; it is, rightly, a vital commercial consideration of any purchase. But when price is the point that is focal of conversation it can be all too easy to lose sight of the combination of factors that go into determining that price. Particularly when it comes to technology that, because of its nature that is utility-like very nearly taken for granted.

It’s all too an easy task to switch off only a little and become ambivalent to your things we are knowledgeable about, and so it never hurts to be reminded not just of what something does, but the way the nuances of its performance, and pricing, can affect the rest of our lives that are working.

Download our ebook, 5 More benefits of Private Cloud, to uncover other ways it can benefit your business

Tiers are more than just stepping stones
That’s certainly the full case when it comes to uk colocation tiers. This methodology that is standard defining data center engineering standards, in tiers one-to-four, lends itself too effortlessly to being dismissed as superficially obvious. All things considered, Tier 1 is minimal well-performing and Tier 4 is the greatest, Tier 1 the option that is cheapest and Tier 4 the most costly right? As soon as you’ve got the head around that, what else will there be?

Therein lies part of the nagging problem with taxonomies; simple to read labels can hide a wealth of valuable information.

Getting the head around a number of the distinctions into the tiers will mean you’re able to make better decisions when it comes to choosing a colocation uk, and most significantly you’ll avoid a number of potential pitfalls.

Crunching the numbers
First, let’s consider the uptime differences between the four tiers.

Tier 1 equates to the fundamental requirements for a cheap colocation – a single distribution path for energy and cooling serving the processing hardware, and capacity that is non-redundant. Annually, uptime would be at the rate of 99.671% and include 1,730.4 moments (1.20167 days) of downtime.

Tier 2 infrastructure gives you redundant capacity that can be swapped in and out without causing system failure. It will also include one distribution path that is non-redundant. Tier 2 uk server colocation aren’t designed to be fault tolerant when it comes to things like natural disasters, but they have 99.741% uptime, and 1,362.2 minutes of downtime, per year. That means almost 23 hours.

Tier 3 Rackspace colocation have actually one active and one distribution path that is passive. They’re built to be more resilient, although they’re not intended to be completely immune to disasters. But they will withstand them better, thanks to higher capability gear. Tier 3 data centers offer 99.982percent of uptime and 94.7 minutes of downtime each year.

Tier 4 are fault tolerant with two active distribution paths, offering the level that is highest of capacity, including mission-critical levels of tolerance, fully redundant subsystems and components with concurrent maintainability. They also have dual-powered cooling systems. Uptime is 99.995% per year, and the annual downtime is 26.3 moments.

Get the balance right for your company
Unless you are running genuinely mission-critical applications and downtime is utterly unconscionable, you are unlikely to want to shoulder the not insignificant investment a Tier 4 1u colocation pricing will require, which could be as much as double the cost of a Tier 3. Tier 4 also involves a very high environmental overhead, and a much higher carbon footprint.

Similarly, unless all you’re doing is running a simple information-only, non-transactional site, you should walk far from Tier 1 too.

Identifying which for the two tiers that are remaining right for you comes down to understanding the impact of a number of the differences.

Even at the headline level, the difference in annual downtime between Tier 2 and Tier 3 is substantial, from almost one day that is full to just over an hour and a half, respectively. Are there going to be cost implications? Of course there are. But pause, if you will, and reflect on the difference in those downtime numbers; one is the time it takes to fly from London to Sydney. The other may be the amount of a football match, with a stoppage that is little included on.

That’s a considerable difference, and you’d require to imagine carefully about the potential for exposing your company to harmful consequences as a result of it. A lot can take place in 24 hours.

You need to map that against what’s being offered by your data center if you have SLAs in place with your clients and customers that include penalties and reparations for missed application availability. If unexpected outages prompt modest financial reparations from your data center, for instance, how does that stack up with the possible losings for the business due to those outages? Will it make a difference if customers arrive at your can’t and site transact with you? Will your clients invoke penalty clauses in SLAs if applications they rely upon are impacted?

Making the choice that is right
Weighing up which data center tier are the best fit for your business operations is more than a simple price vs uptime equation. Price differentials are inexorably lined to tiers, but you can’t do a like-for-like comparison in these circumstances until you are completely up-to-speed with all the implications. You’ll need to peel straight back some layers and understand what the implications are in the event the lights stop.

Hope for the best, plan the worst? Maybe. But know about the need to do a little risk assessment when it concerns determining where your online business shall be hosted. Knowing which data center tiers your potential providers operate from will always be an essential step that is first.